The present invention relates generally to board games and, more particularly, to a trucking business-simulation game for two or more players in which each player operates a trucking company in competition with other players.
A number of games are known which simulate aspects of the trucking industry. The U.S. Pat. No. 4,109,917 discloses a trucking game which simulates Citizens Band Radio (CB) communications during play. The game includes (1) a game board comprising a map of the continental United States with selected highway routes, and (2) tokens in the shape of miniature trucks for marking the progress of the players as they sequentially traverse the highway routes on the board. The game also includes a miniature police automobile simulating "Smokey": a policeman.
The U.S. Pat. No. 4,426,084 discloses a trucking simulation game which also comprises a playing board and a truck-like playing piece for each player. The playing board, in this case, has a single, predetermined travel path which is constituted by a plurality of playing spaces along which each truck-like playing piece is advanced during play.
Neither of these two games effectively simulates the operations of real-world trucking companies. The game disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,109,917 does not provide for the transportation of cargo of various types from one point on the board to another by means of the tokens. Instead, a set of "load cards" are used to determine the origin and destination terminal of each shipment, the type of freight hauled and the "ordinary" and "convoy" rates received when the load is delivered.
The U.S. Pat. No. 4,426,084 is considerably more complicated in that the rules of the game provide for buying and selling of goods at different locations along the travel path. Like the U.S. Pat. No. 4,109,917, the truck-like playing pieces are not used for transporting the goods. Rather, the goods are simulated by "truck load cards" which are used together with "load instruction cards" to represent the different goods to be considered loaded on, and carried by the respective playing pieces.